 Hello, Oscillator Sync here, and this is the Korg Mod Wave. Korg's hybrid wavetable sample playback synth, which also has a virtual analog sort of end at the end, really, really good effects as well. But actually, the part of the name that's most interesting to me is the mod part, because the modulation sources on this and how they all interact are really, really interesting. And that's something that I really want to dig in some depth on the channel in some upcoming videos. But this is a new polysynth to the channel, so as tradition dictates today, we are going to be building a pad patch from scratch. So in terms of the type of pad we're going to aim for today, it is, of course, very possible and very tempting to do a big ambient washi pad or even sort of lean into the sort of early days of wavetable type sounds. But I thought it would be interesting to maybe go to a different place. So what we're going to aim for today is a bit of a darker, grittier kind of sound, maybe kind of drawing inspiration from the sort of thing that, say Trent Rosner would use sort of like a bed to a song or something, that sort of sort of slightly evil sounding, but still sort of classic sounding thing going on there. So that's what we're going to aim for, see how we get on. In the interest of transparency, Cork sent the mod wave over to me to make some videos on. I'm not going to pay for any of the videos, and they have no say in what I do in the videos, but that is the situation here. Right, let's make a pad, I guess. So we're here on an initialised patch, which is making use of the basic sort of virtual analog wavetable, which is all good. Now, we will start digging into all of our wavetables and samples in just a second. But there's one thing that I like to do with most of the patches I've been playing with this. And it's something that that I kind of often had to do via the mod matrix on the Ops 6, but there's actually functionality built in for this. And that's essentially introducing some oscillator drift so that there's sort of some detuning between the notes, not just sort of between the oscillators, which just gives you an overall more sort of rich sound to my ears in most cases. Sometimes you want that really sort of in tune hardness, but for this sort of patch in particular, I think having things a little bit wonky is probably going to be a benefit. So we want to be in the perform menu here and a couple of pages in. We're looking for, yeah, the random pitch range here. So we start off with this very in tune kind of sound, and then somewhere around eight cents tends to be a good sort of sweetening without it, obviously sounding out of tune. So we go from always the same there and somewhere around here, just sort of, you're trying to get that sort of analog, not quite totally in tune in this. We can push this harder as well, incidentally, and it might be beneficial in this kind of darker sound if we go even like as high as 12. That's kind of the point at which things start to sound like they might be out of tune rather than just sort of richer and pushing it much higher than that will start getting obviously out of tune. So maybe I'll stick it somewhere around 9.5 for the moment, we can always fine tune that as we go on with the patch. So on the old wave, we've got two layers of identical sort of patch architecture. Some of the modulation sources are shared between them. The chaos physics in particular, which is good fun. But even within each layer, you've still got two oscillators and those oscillators can even blend between two different wave forms as well. So there's a lot of scope here. What I thought I'd probably base this patch around however is like a choir type patch. I kind of like that kind of as a basis. And there's some really good built-in samples and you can import your own, of course. I'm going to stick my choir on the second oscillator just because I'd like having the first one if I'm going to put samples. I like to have this one for like oscillators because you've got the sub in there and everything. So I'll turn down the both at the same time. So I'll turn down that oscillator and we'll go over to sample here and we can start to browse what we've got here. We can browse by category and just in the interest of transparency, I did sort of do some sample shopping so I know more or less which sample I'm going to be going for here. But anyway, I can go into the second page here on the wave select type. What am I doing? That's wrong. Let's go back to the first page. I just want to come into here to select a sample here. Category, we can come in here and I'm going to go down to vocal. There we go. And the one I'm looking for, there's a choir whisper M. You hear that buzzing a little bit and that's because when I came into the other page here, I actually set the mod type to AM. That's actually the sample there. But yes, as soon as we did just turn that on, we have the ability to do amplitude modulation and ring modulation on this against oscillator one, which is introducing all that kind of rasp and rattle, which I really, really actually quite like. So I'm going to leave that on as it happens. It was a mistake, but happy accidents and all that kind of thing. So I do actually quite like that. I think on this sample as well, yeah, so here we've got the start offset. So the moment is off, which means it's going to start at the start of the sample. But the samples on the mod wave have the ability to have different start points. And I think the first, there's only one here, but this will start sort of part way in so you don't get that heart, heart, which I think I prefer having something that's a little bit more sort of on to begin with. Probably the other thing we're going to want to do here is just give it a bit more of a release so we can come into the amp envelope. Probably don't want the attack quite as instant on, but and the nice thing is this is a stereo sample. So even with that amplitude modulation, if you're listening in headphones or with decent monitors, you'll be able to hear that that sort of buzzy raspiness is kind of moving around a little bit, which creates this lovely stereo interest almost for free by accident in this case. In fact, so that's good. Right. We've also got our other oscillator here, which I'm going to use for a wave table. And again, there's a lot of wave tables on this thing. So I did go wave table shopping. And there are a couple that I like the sound of. We'll probably use the AB. So we're going to load in two different wave tables, and then we can use the blend to move between them. And the position will be fixed. So the position for one way will be the same for the other, but we can still move between the blends there. So the first one that I kind of like the sound of if we come over here, it was one of these airwaves ones. I think it was number one, actually. So just for the moment, we'll turn down our choir. Yeah, so that's that's definitely giving you that sort of classic wave table vibe. Got some buzzy stuff in there, some organic kind of stuff in there, vocally stuff in there. So it's quite a range, which is really nice. Cool. So we'll choose that one as our starting wave table. And then we then got the mod here, which we can apply to the mods on the wave tables and on the samples. But there's many, many more on the wave tables are kind of like a static processing that you can add to the wave table. So you can do things in here like take out samples, clip stuff, low pass. It's organized one, which turns everything into an organ version of itself. And you can't modulate these, these don't have an amount, they're just sort of like a fixed thing. You've got the vintage ones, which are your sort of bit reduction ones, which is quite nice on this. It has that ringing on it. Vintage 12 one similar, but not as obvious. You've also got more clipping stuff, which can introduce quite a lot of grit. If you want more aggressive sounds, that's interesting. And then we've got the tilt up, tilt down, which are like EQ curves and sort of low boosts and low cuts. We want to thin things out. So it's a really useful way of getting more out of a single wave table. I think maybe just clipping this one, just the soft clip, just gets a little bit more grit out of it, or we'll go with the vintage eight one. Yeah, that's cool. Okay, we'll go with that. I'm a sucker for that sort of sound. I can't help it. And then on this other one, I think it was another air wave one, I quite like the sound of it. So if we throw the blend all the way across, we're now just listening to the second wave table. I think it was like 37. Yeah, because that's got some sort of discordant stuff in it, I quite like. I'm blending between them. They kind of work together quite nicely because one's got a bit more stability. Let's hear it with the what I might do with this one in terms of the mod is I might use the tilt down just to take a little bit of that buzziness out. Yeah, cool. Okay. So those are two basic sound sources. And the other thing I might do is on the wave table. I'll drop that down an octave perhaps, make it a bit more evil. Oh, yeah. That low end there. And then bring in that buzz. And of course, we'll get these things moving in just a second. But I think that's a good starting tonality. So I just want to come back over to this choir sample for a second. So I had this idea, because it's kind of like this slightly it's sort of low fi take quality to it that I thought I would lean into it a bit more and use that to add some movement to it. So so obviously one of the things we could do is just add some straight up pitch movement to it, which I might do. But I wanted to kind of get that sort of sort of glitchy, wow and flutter kind of thing happening there. So that sort of instability to the sound. So you sort of go kind of thing going on. So this allows me to look at one of the really, really interesting uses for the way that the LFOs or actually anything and the envelopes can interact. So what I will do is, okay, so we'll use this envelope here. And I want to create like a sort of a kind of sound. So it's just a really short glitchy thing going on here. We can tweak this maybe in a minute or wanted. There we go. So just got like a little glitch. And what I want to do is I want to send that to the tuning of our choir sample. So to do that, we're going to use the mod matrix. So we hold our mod plus add new targets. My target is going to be the tuning of oscillator two. So we go shift and tuning. And my source is going to be this envelope here. We've got four envelopes and five LFOs. So we've got envelopes and LFOs for days. And we can obviously send them to different sources using the mod matrix as well. Okay, so there we go. Now if I maybe that kind of glitch sound there, but I don't want it to happen at the start. I just want it to just keep happening at random times. So this is how we can do that. So if we come into the oscillator one here, and we come into its third page, we have this thing here, which is the trigger source. So by default with most envelopes, as you are probably aware, you tend to trigger them when you press a key, right? That sends the envelope going. So the trigger source by default is key down, right? It's the gate signal. But we can actually set this to almost anything on this synth. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to send it, can use the amp LFO, because I never use the amp LFO for amp. So we'll just pick that one. So we want to come down to wrong button. I have to say that sometimes I do press the wrong button still on this thing. I'm still occasionally getting that wrong. So we want to go to generators, and we want the amp LFO perfect. So now if I, and also I'll tell it not to trigger when I press the note down. So now if I press a key, you can hear that envelope keeps triggering. It's going to be triggering in time with my amp LFO. If we come back into this page just here, we can see here that there's this trigger threshold, which means that when the LFO gets over 50% of its maximum, it's going to trigger it. So with any periodic LFO, that's just going to keep going periodically. But we could on here come down to our shape and pick one of our random shapes instead. Because this is random, it's not going to happen constantly. We're just going to occasionally get these little glitches and we can fine tune the shape of these glitches by changing the envelope that's doing them. And we could fine tune how often they're happening either by changing the frequency on our LFO or we could change the threshold for when it changes. So it's less likely to go over. So if we want it to happen more often, lowering it and probably work. So I think it needs to be a little bit quicker. Maybe not quite as high, like at one and a half centimeters dead. And this is going to keep happening across all the different notes we're playing because this LFO is sort of pern note. So we've got this sort of tape wobble thing happening in there, which I think is really cool. Bring our wavetable up, balance that level a little bit. Okay, so we need to get these blends and positions moving for sure. Let's just hold that note for a second so I can use both hands. So let's get these moving around. And I can't help myself. Let's use the chaos physics because I like to throw the little ball down. Look at it go. There are more important features on this synth, in my opinion. But I do just like them. Anyway, so I reckon probably like use X for blend and Y for position all the way around might be just a simple way of getting some movement here. So mod plus position, just sweep to the side. We'll get chaos X there. Yes, please. We'll put the intensity. So we'll put position in the middle and put intensity at 50. That'll sweep across the whole thing for us. Or maybe just over 50. And now if we come back here, we can see that sort of sound is happening as that ball moves across. If I ping it, good stuff. I could say it is really good fun. And we'll do the same for blend as well. So add blend sweep it down for Y. And again, we'll go for 50. And it's just all the chaos physics is really good for is creating organic modulation that is sort of more controlled than a random source, but more uncertain than say like a triangle or an envelope. So I want to fine tune this so it works better with this sound. So obviously that's moving too fast. So we can basically turn down the time of the simulation here, like that. And then even if I ping it hard, it's going to slow it down. We can also now turn the friction down, maybe even to zero so that it basically never ends. So as soon as I ping it, because the friction is zero, it shouldn't ever end. On this page, we can change the bouncing at the moment. The bounces aren't adding or taking away anything, which is great. We could also shove a bump in here as well, which will affect how the ball is going to move. And if we wanted to skew it so that it's more sort of likely to do stuff down the bottom for longer, then we can maybe skew stuff down there. Which again, it's just going to add some sort of uncertainty to the sound. We could also get this gravity well moving around if we wanted to by modulating its position. That's a modulation destination, which is amazing. And we'll see if we need to. I don't want to dwell too much on this. I'll probably do a whole video on this particular feature. It is really good fun. But that's certainly given us some movement happening with our wave table. I think I also probably want to... What's really, really cool here is that each of our waveforms here, at least for oscillators if you like, can be panned individually. So they're stereo waveforms, they're stereo oscillators. So we've already got our stereo sample here, but we could actually have this wave ping about a bit, which I think would be really, really cool. So let's pick another one of our oscillators. Actually, we could just use the amp one because that's already... Yeah, let's just use the amp one perhaps. It might be a bit too fast. We don't need to slow it down. So again, modulation, all modulation, modulation, modulation, so I'll do modulation add. We're going to aim it at our pan there. And use amp as the source. And now our choir, which is already stereo, is happening in the middle there. And this other waveform is moving around. Great. All right. It's good fun. This is a really fun synth. Very different to the Opsix, I have to say. Being really familiar with the Opsix didn't really help me learn this synth actually, because it's so different actually. But it is really good fun. And as I say, it's the modulation stuff that's really, really exciting. Anyway, right. What next? So I feel like I want to get some grit into this sound a little bit more dirt into it. And we've got our pre-effects that we could sort of stuff up in. But there's another way that we can do it on the mod wave, because the various different filter models, we have a Poly6, MS20, we've got the multi-filters and some others that are sort of cleaner. The MS20 model in particular saturates. So naturally, it's going to create sort of grit and distortion. So if I come down here and if I give it a bit more resonance, in particular, here that on those extremes, we are getting grit and distortion. There's actually a gain setting here where we can change the gain staging into the filter, only on the Poly6 and the MS20. But we can reduce the distortion by going down to normal there. Or we can go the other way and encourage that distortion. And some of those low frequencies get really sort of blown out and aggressive. More resonance will give us more grit. But when you're at unity gain on the MS20 and you've got two oscillates running into it, it's going to grit up a bit anyway. So those low ends. Cool, cool, cool. I want you a bit more release on that one. On that amp, sorry. One thing I might do also for this sort of patch, I don't want the velocity to affect the amp quite as much. I might have it affect something else. Not sure what yet. I'll have to think about that. But at the moment when I play lightly, when I tend to play a bit more lightly, it's really, really quiet. So sorry if it's been a bit quiet. So we'll just reduce how much the velocity goes to our amp there. Doing a bit of reaction there, but nowhere near as much as we had. Somewhere at the low end is kind of glorious. Okay, I think it'd be good for the filter to be moving around, probably just randomly just to pick out different notes with like a really slow random modulation. So we'll come to our filter, LFO here, we'll set it to one of our random smooth random. Random five is random time and level. So it's not going to be so obviously periodic. So that's probably a good place to go. So for this one, we don't need to use the mod envelope because it should just be so that we can access through the filter here on one of the pages here yet. I also feel like we probably don't want in this case to have any key tracking built in to the filter. We want it to be dark at the top end, not brighten up as we get up there, or if there is just barely. But we probably could send our velocity to which case is probably our filter, couldn't we, and just have it brighter when I play harder, rather than louder, which is sometimes better than having it actually get louder, louder in some patches. So here, so we've got velocity into envelope. So at the moment the envelope isn't doing anything, but we'll just add a bit of envelope in here in a second. So I'll just try 20 to begin with. So our envelope shape at the moment, we probably just want it to be just on set and then fade out, playing lightly. Okay, that's way too much, or rather it's way too bright to begin with probably. So that's light playing. So the other thing here is that our filter LFO is going to be random, it's going to start at a random place, so it doesn't, like I feel like I have some control but not enough. So two things we'll do in the LFO here. First it's going too fast, so we'll just make it go slower. We'll try that. But the other thing is I'm going to set a fade so that for the first, like second and a half, the LFO's effect is fading in, so we don't immediately get it taking over and immediately shifting us either up or down. So it feels more like there's a direct connection to how hard I'm playing. So I think, again, coming just back to the filter envelope, I probably do want a bit of decay and a sustain down just so that old notes sort of fade into the background a little bit, but we'll have a sort of a long decay, so it takes like, this is a droney kind of patch, so maybe even as much as like six or seven seconds for it to fade away perhaps. Yeah, even that's probably a bit too fast. And there's a lot of different flavors just by changing that cut off. Getting it more resonances going to make it scream. Yes. That might be a bit bit much for some people. I think that's cool though. Certainly when I finish the video I might come back and crank the resonance a little bit more. Right, at this point let's treat ourselves to a little bit of reverb because, you know, you've got to treat yourself to a little bit of reverb. So we'll come over to the reverb here and we'll turn it on. I'm just going to use the basic over setting for the moment. What we'll need to do, because we're on layer one, we'll need to make sure that layer one, sorry, layer A rather, layer A send is turned up. So we can come down here. It's like not super obvious because we've already got quite a lot of stereo movement and depth going on here, but we'll just keep ourselves a little bit more size, which matters, and a little bit longer. Just giving us a bit of a halo around the sound. Lovely. So I was thinking probably I would only do one layer for this patch because otherwise the video is going to be very long, but I think at this point if you're on my channel you're probably expecting it to be a long video anyway. So let's add a second layer in as well, I think, because I think it'd be good to add a straight up bass thing so that on the lower notes, probably just on the lower notes, maybe even set up as a mono synth, we can just have a bass note, so whichever is the lowest note I'm playing, I've got a bass, maybe just a square wave kind of thing happening. So let's come across to layer B and turn it on. So now we're editing layer B instead, we've got that default patch on layer B as well. So let's just move over to basic two that starts with a square wave, yeah. Cool, yeah. We'll start with that. Don't think we need to do anything particularly crazy with this, perhaps we could drop it in octave probably because we want it to be a bass, so we'll just come down. So it's just giving us that fundamental. So we've just got that friend down there, I've got the MS-20 on again. I think I'm editing the wrong layer there, whoops, I want to do that. I can add some buzz by opening that resonance there. So without, with, just adding a bit more fundamental, probably also in the amp here, don't want it to be track and velocity barely at all. So without, and with. So like we're getting some white happening there with that. We've got two oscillators, so I feel like we should use them probably. Maybe sort of turn off A so we can hear it probably. Maybe we could use something like there's one here that's called boiling, yeah, which is just kind of like we turn this one down just adds to that ringing as the resonance there. Like it's really unstable. I think we might just add, yeah, just destabilizes everything. So yeah, let's track that in there. So we'll use an LFO for that. So the LFOs are per layer. So this is a brand new set of LFOs. So you've got, you've got the five on, on A and then you've got the five on B and the same with the envelopes, the physics is shared, the sequencer is shared, but your LFOs and envelopes are per layer, which is kind of bonkers really when you think about it. So we'll go with a random one by default. That's the morph, so we don't want that. So we'll go mod add. We want the position of our boiling friend there, and we'll use oscillator two LFO for that. Set that in the middle 50% so it swings all the way. It's just destabilizing everything in a really cool way. Bring the other layer back in. Let's get, okay, I wasn't going to have the filter screen on the other layer, but let's get the filter screen a little bit more on this layer and have that move around a little bit as well. So maybe we'll stick with a triangle, just make it super slow for the filter. So we're in the filter LFO here, make it run real slow, and we can come into the filter settings and LFO, that resonance is picking stuff out, but maybe we don't want the resonance going on constantly. Perhaps we want the resonance to sort of peek up and sort of scream at us now and again instead. So let's turn that down and again, we'll just use one of the LFOs, use the amp one, as I say, rarely use it for amp stuff anyway, and we'll go for another random friend. 5 will do, and yeah, we'll modulate the resonance using the amp LFO by about 30% just occasionally get more of a screamy friend happening there. Cool. Yes, I like that a lot, but let's fine tune the way that's behaving a little bit. So the first thing I want to do is at the moment, that's adding that sub thing happening to every note I'm playing, and actually I just want it to be like a bass note. So let's make it layer B into a mono synth, which is really straightforward to do in the perform menu as long as you're on the right layer. If you come across a couple of pages, yeah, here we got B voice assigned at the moment, it's set to poly and we can send that to mono. We can choose whether or not to have legato, probably I do, and we can set the note priority, which we probably want to be low in this case. So now if I play, can you hear this upper note doesn't have that sub happening? Only the lowest note I'm playing now does. So now we've got layer B and we can prove this return of A here a little bit easier. So any highest note is going to be our dirty, broken, square way friend. The other thing is we probably don't want it to go much higher than here. I don't think we don't want it to to be evident at all, I don't think. So we can also, a little bit back here, we've got a keyboard zone so we can set up zoning for our different layers. So we can set a high point of layer B, which can probably be C5, yeah. So now not only is it a mono synth with lowest note priority, it now also doesn't stray into our higher notes because it sounds a bit weird if we're playing a high chord and not playing a bass line but we still have that thing happening. Put A back in. So now even if I play up here, we don't get that bass note but here it starts to come in again. And we can set up fades on that as well if we wanted to but I think that will probably do us for this anyway. The last thing that I thought could be really cool with our bass friend in, perhaps we'll just turn off A again so we can hear on its own, is if it was pulsing octaves in tempo. So if we use our pitch LFO, we want it to pulse so we'll set our wave shape to be a square of course. And if I come into pitch here, I believe it's in here, we can set the LFO obviously too fast. Also that's actually sending it sort of out from the centre point instead. So what we can do on the LFO I think is if we come into the offset, if we set that to about plus 100, I think that makes it a unipolar so it's only going to go up from that point. Really, really useful to have these offsets in here. So if I now come into our LFO here and we only have to do plus six because the pitch assumes that it's going to be 12 for an octave so you have to realise that's what's going on a little bit. But that's much better. We want to set this to be related to the tempo and maybe more like that. And we probably also want to turn on sync notes so when we play the Gato it doesn't restart the LFO each time. With the other layer we'll turn our tempo down in general I think. Evil, dark friends. At the moment our bass isn't going into the reverb but we could have it going in there because I think it might be interesting when the resonance goes high if it sort of peaks that into the reverb. I think it's a bit more width as well. The nice thing about having the layers is that you have different filters per each layer. But again if the distortion was a bit much we could always change the gain staging here or use the trim here but it sounds a bit boring without it now in my opinion. Let's put some delay on for when we crank up the distortion like that. Again so the layer effects, delay, mod effects, pre effects are only per layer. It's only the reverb and EQ that are shared. Let's go over the three head one which will give us some stereo spread as well. Synths are great. Anything else? I tell you what we could do just to polish this off. One of the things that I really appreciate about this synth is that we do have. Master EQ across the whole patch which allows us just to fine-tune things a little bit. So we could turn that on won't make any difference at the moment because we've got nothing going on in here. I suspect if I duck out around sort of 550 hertz, clear things up in a way that's useful. It's a bit more definition. There's probably going to be a bit of build up around 2K-ish, two and a half maybe to my ears. Might be beneficial to take out but it might also be giving a fair bit of character because it's lower. Yeah that's where a lot of the character lives so I don't want to duck that out. And if we wanted to just beef up the low end, not that we're lacking it particularly, we could do that. So just to finish off just to recap where we're at. The parts of our sound that we have here, I'll just save it first why not, we've got a choir here which was our starting point. This evil friend that's panning around and that's what's happening on the chaos pad. It's interesting we get different kind of feels whether I flick up or or across. So we've got those friends there and then on layer B our square wave friend. We have our destabilizing friend there as well. One thing we didn't use actually is the sub. So perhaps we'll throw in, we probably don't want the square sub there as use some noise instead. So again we'll just give us some extra grip. It's all about grit today. And then one last bit of fine tuning just listening to it now is that I think probably if we come into the perform here we can probably just turn layer B down a bit because we do want it to be a little bit more about the pad. If you want to pretend to be Trent Reznor you just use mixed modes all the time, my suggestion. Like I say a very fun synth and hopefully a slightly different patch to kick off its residency on the channel. So anyway, if you've made it to the end of the video, nice one. Thanks for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did then as always it's massively appreciated if you could give the video one of those thumbs up and make sure you are subscribed to the channel especially if you're interested in the mod wave because we've got some mod wave stuff coming up. Oh yes, we have. I really want to dig in a lot into the way that the various different modulation sources interact like we didn't even touch the sequencer today. And that's because that is a video all unto itself because it's really, really interesting. Talk a bit more about the chaos physics. Talk a bit more about the interactions that we can have between our LFOs and envelopes that can be really, really interesting. It's such a deep synth. The mob wave and the Opposites for me are absolute sort of sound design dreams. It's just a wonderful place to get lost in as a sound designer because there's so much to explore. Always feels like quite a modular approach on those two synths which I really, really appreciate. What else is coming up? I've got a little bit more Opposites stuff that I want to talk about coming up soon. I want to talk about the current state of my modular because I haven't really featured it on the channel for a little while so I might do a state of the modular kind of video. It might be the next one I put out. I haven't quite decided yet. Not that I have a release schedule of it anyway. As always, thanks so much for watching and until next time, take care. Bye-bye.